Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the season to be staged in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that elapses focus are more focused on the looming critical moment in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of 600 rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader consults a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
